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NEWS
F1: Ups and downs in GP TV
The Ten Network had a win with its telecast of the Australian Grand Prix, but the race had a much smaller audience in F1 heartland Britain this yearSydney and Melbourne audiences jump, but British viewers vanish
A lot more Australians watched Melbourne's Grand Prix live on TV this year, but the audience shrank in Britain -- arguably still the key international market. The Ten Network's telecast last Sunday averaged almost 1.4 million viewers in the five major capital cities -- up about 25 per cent on last year. The biggest improvements were in the two biggest capitals -- the Sydney audience was up more than 50 per cent to 327,000 and host city Melbourne almost 30 per cent to 650,000.While race organisers claimed the best attendance at the Albert Park circuit for several years, clearly lots more Melburnians prefer to watch the GP free on TV rather than pay to go to the track - exacerbating the losses on the staging of the event. Ten was justifiably delighted with the jump in audience for its telecast, highlighting that the 1.36 million average for the five capitals was the best since its 1.499 million in 2005 -- perhaps helped by its injection of more celebrity interviews in the lead-in to the race.
Ten's GP result topped rival Seven's average 1.212 million for last October's Bathurst 1000, which also was a substantial improvement on the previous year (but way below previous peaks). The GP was the No. 2 program on Australian television last Sunday, beaten only by Seven's My Kitchen Rules with an average of more than 1.7 million viewers. Last year's five-capitals average for the GP was 1.112 million and it had not been above 1.273 million the past six years.
While there was TV joy on the home front, it was a very different story in Britain, home of most of the F1 teams -- including victorious McLaren, winning driver Jenson Button and podium teammate and fellow front row starter Lewis Hamilton.
The race was broadcast live on pay channel Sky Sports in Britain for the first time under the controversial deal F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone did in the middle of last year. The average British audience throughout Sunday's race on Sky was 874,000 -- compared with 2.13 million on the free-to-air BBC last year (and similar figures in previous years).
The London Guardian newspaper's John Plunkett reported that, while there was a peak of 1.02 million viewers on Sky as Button took the chequered flag, "its overall audience was down 75 per cent on BBC1's coverage last year".
The Daily Mail's Phil Duncan noted that that peak of just over 1 million on Sky compared with 3.1 million on the BBC when Red Bull Racing's Sebastian Vettel took the chequered flag first in Melbourne last year.
By this author's calculations, the average audience in Britain for the live telecast between 6am and 7.40am last Sunday was down 59.9 per cent on last year and the peak audience -- at the finish -- was down 67.1 per cent.
Plunkett reported that a highlights program of last Sunday's Melbourne race on BBC1 between 2pm and 4pm averaged 2.7 million viewers. That was in line with afternoon replays in previous years.
Both Plunkett and Duncan noted that there was always going to be a sharp drop in the live audience in Britain with the move to pay TV. Duncan pointed out that (despite Britain's much bigger population and traditional attachment to F1) the number of British viewers watching live last Sunday was lower than the Ten audience in Australia for the first time. Plunkett also noted that the Australian GP "is traditionally one of the lower-rating F1 races because of the time difference".
Sunday's British audience figures included viewers who recorded the race and watched it later in the day, as did the BBC1 figures for last year, Plunkett said. It will be intriguing now to see the British audience figures for this Sunday's Malaysian GP and the Chinese GP two weeks later.
The Times in London reported 11 months ago that last year's Malaysian race had an audience of 3.6 million on the BBC, despite being shown early in the morning, and the Chinese race, also early in the British day, had reached five million. Both those figures were substantially higher than that for the Australian GP.
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Written byGeoffrey Harris
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